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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The Good Guy vs The Liar: National Relationships in Crisis

This last year has been frustrating for me
as I’ve watched so much news coverage of Republicans and seen so many damning
and utterly ill-informed articles about Barack Obama.Seriously, it just got a bit much.Not because I have anything against
Republicans as individuals, but because of all the distortions that the Awfully
Conservative have happily spewed out in lieu of truth.

There’s been too much of something that’s
not right about it all.That something
is a unique mix of an absence of elementary logic, a total ignorance of cause
and effect, and sheer memory loss.

I think it’s reasonable of me to presume
that a large proportion of the US doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, so I’m left
perplexed.

For example, why would anyone want to
forget the state that the US was in when Obama took office?Why would they want to forget that G.W.
Bush’s approval rating was 22% when his term of office was over?(CBS News, Feb. 11 2009)Wiki puts that figure at 19%.

Why would anybody want to ignore that there was a reason for such widespread
unpopularity?On September 2 2007 Nelson
D. Schwartz of the NY Times wrote "At current rates so far this year,
RealtyTrac expects foreclosure filings to hit two million in 2007, or roughly
one per 62 American households — a rate approaching heights not seen since the
Great Depression."

According to Tim Bishop,who quotes Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, G.W. Bush “assumed office
with a $250 billion surplus for the previous fiscal year - and
a booming economy. He left his successor with a $1.2 trillion budget
deficit and an economy that was losing 750,000 jobs a month.”

With something as massive and complex as the US economy, the
effect of bad government is long term.And that effect doesn’t stop immediately once corrective measures have
begun to be put in place.The law of
cause of effect isn’t man-made and it’s not something anybody can
manipulate.It just is.

We all accept that if you smoke heavily all your life
you’ll probably get cancer.Do you get
it after the first cigarette?Of course
not.And if you have treatment, is your
cancer cured after the first session?Nope.Sometimes when you’ve
abused your body that much the treatment doesn’t ever work. Fortunately
for the US, the economy is recoverable.How do I know this?

Because it’s already in recovery. Here’s the part that really defies logic and
seems to indicate a downright hemorrhaging of memory:Obama is criticised for not creating enough jobs,
and Conservatives want to bring back a Republican administration.Yet, in the entire eight years of the G.W. Bush
Administration, job creation averaged+0.51% in the first term and -0.84% in the second. (Wiki)

Notice the minus figure there. Obama’s average, on the other hand, is +0.85% and
it’s getting better.Slowly,
admittedly.Not nearly fast enough.But when you consider where all three of
these men started from, it’s actually brilliant.Isn’t it?Aparently not.Obama can be
blamed, but not either of the Bushes?George H.W. Bush averaged +0.69 despite that the previous term average
was +2.53%.Oops, what happened there?Ah, but that wasn’t his fault, I forgot.Silly me.

To
get serious for a moment, I know people are suffering, and I don’t mean to
minimise that.I know what suffering
is.I know what it means to not be able
to get any kind of job and to not be able to put food on the table.I know the place it takes you to.I know how dark things can seem, how
hopeless.No human being should have to
experience that.

But none of it is Barack Obama’s fault.And I don’t believe blaming him, or bringing
in a Conservative Republican administration will solve any of the
problems.Mitt Romney isn’t an honest
man – and let’s face it, even Conservative Republicans don’t like him.And he’s shifting in the wind like crazy
right now.

But, what will be will be.If America comes to its senses and gives Obama
a chance to build on what he’s begun, then America will reap the benefits.If not, cause and effect will operate whether people want
it to or not.If Romney is elected, America, the middle class and the whole world will suffer. How much does he want to add to
military spending – without knowing know what he wants to spend it
on?That looks terrifyingly as if
he’s a puppet of the military industrial complex.

More guns.More
wars.More lies. More wealth creation for the already
wealthy.It’s not a pretty picture.But, the biggest
block of resistance to Obama is conservative elderly white males.Republicans haven’t reached the youth and if they don’t change that this will
be the last election they have a chance of winning.

What is it with those white
guys anyway? They're bullies. Why don’t they just go to
therapy and find out how to conduct their relationships and their lives with integrity.